CNN`s Lemon Recycles Rodney King Myth For A New Generation

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On Saturday evening, just as the
family and I were finishing dinner, CNN`s 1-hour“Special Report”
on the March 3 twentieth anniversary of the
Rodney King incident,Race and Rage,
began to
re-air at full volume on our television screen.

The opening scenes included brief,
dark footage of the baton-swinging LAPD officers,
close-up visuals of King`s swollen and bloody face, and
the violent aftermath of the acquittal of four officers,
which touched off deadly riots.

The stunned reaction of our
daughters (ages 12 and 16), and their jaw-dropped facial
expressions to the now famous—and edited—video footage of LAPD officers striking King with blow
after blow with their
batons, brought home a stark reality. The younger
generation of gullible TV viewers—kids who were too
young to remember the actual incident —uncritically soak
up this highly sensational footage, packaged and
presented as an unbiased special broadcast by a major
news organization.

But there`s nocontext. It is
as if details are irrelevant—all that matters is the
visual image of white cops beating a black motorist.

Much ofRace and Rage
consists of a celebrity-style interview of King by CNN
anchor
Don Lemon, a young, black male host of CNN`s weekend
news segment. At key moments in the show, King is
sitting across from Lemon, a casually dressed,
sympathetic interviewer, the male counterpart of CNN`s
Soledad O`Brien.

Lemon asks King to recall what took
place on the early morning hours of March 3, 1991, when
King was
pulled over after an 8-mile freeway
chase at speeds in excess of 117mph.King and Lemon
drive to the spot where King was pulled over by LAPD
officers. King gets face down on the pavement,
discussing the conversation that took place, claiming an
officer used the
“N” word while striking him with a baton, as if he
was
innocently picked on because he was a vulnerableblack
motorist.

Critical details of what took place
are glossed over or omitted:

two passengers in King`s
vehicle cooperated with the officers at the scene and
were taken into custody without incident;

King remained in the car
but eventually emerged and behaved peculiarly (he was
intoxicated at the time) and repeatedly resisted
arrest, at one point throwing the officers off his back
and striking one officer in the chest;

King, in a t-shirt, was
sweating suspiciously on a chilly evening;

two tasers that normally
would immobilize large assailants struck King,
temporarily halting his attacks;

he continued to resist
arrest;

officers at the scene
then struck him repeatedly with their batons (56 blows
and six kicks) to subdue King enough to handcuff him.

But none of the details of King`s
lengthy record of reckless and dangerous behavior seemed
worth mentioning from the vantage point of CNN`s
producers. As
Variety`s Brian Lowry has noted:“Just because you
have a camera in the right place doesn`t mean you`re
telling the whole story”. [CNN
Doesn`t Connect With Rodney King Special,
Variety, By Brian Lowry, March 3, 2011]

[See
video of him discussing his book]and LA bureau chief
of the Washington Post (1990-1993), places
considerable blame on the media, especially
broadcast news, for what he describes as the“mythology of the
Rodney King incident”. He points out that what most
Americans saw on that video footage is a“partial record
of a partial record”:

“The mythology
of the
Rodney King incident derives almost entirely from the
edited version of the Holliday
videotape.

“That version begins more than
halfway through an incident in which StaceyKoon [lead LAPD
officer] tried to
take King into custody without hurting him. This fact in
itself sets the incident apart from numerous proven
cases of police brutality in which victims were hit,
choked, or shot without provocation. It also sets the
incident apart from classic police pursuits in which
excited or angry officers, adrenaline pumping,
reflexively beat a suspect once they catch him.

“Several minutes elapsed between
the end of the King pursuit and the first baton blows,
an interim in which officers tried to take King into
custody—first with verbal commands, then by
gang-tackling him and trying to handcuff him, then withKoon`s two
bursts from his powerful electric stun gun. King was not
struck with a baton until he climbed to his feet after
being hit by the second burst from the Taser, then
charged toward [LAPD officer] Laurence Powell.

“That these
facts
are not known or remembered by the public even after three trials is
primarily the fault of television. KTLA won the
prestigious Peabody Award for showing the Holliday
videotape, but when editors at that Los Angeles station
deleted the frames of King`s charge in their effort to
remove subsequent blurry footage, they removed the
explanation for Powell`s first and most damaging baton
blow.

“Newspapers are not blameless in
their coverage. Most reporters, including me, relied
initially on the edited footage and were not aware of
the deleted footage until much later…. Had television
not stacked the deck against the officers with its
shameless editing of the videotape (done, it seems, in
the interests of improving picture quality, rather than
out of editorial bias), the
Simi Valley trial might have ended
differently.

“What the editing did for the
defense in that trial was establish that the media had
not told the whole truth.”

[TV
to Blame for King Myth,Ventura County
Star, January 28, 1998, A1. (Not online)]

In many respects, the real victims
in the Rodney King incident were LAPD officers Stacey
Koon, Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno, and Timothy
Wind They were shamelessly subjected to“double jeopardy” by the unspeakable Bush I Administration by being
placed on trial a second time, after the acquittals in
the first trial, for
violating King`s federal“civil rights”.

MSM Journalists and news executives
have recently been moaning the demise of print media and
the
declining interest in network news broadcasts. The
major news weeklies continue to lose readers as interest
in
alternative news sites soars.

Kevin Lamb (email
him), managing editor of The Social
Contract,
is a former library assistant for Newsweekand managing editor
of Human Events.He was alsoassistant editor of the Evans-Novak Political Report.